


Crown of Knives

by rabbitfurcoat



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Arranged Marriage, F/M, First Time, Red Wedding fix it, Theon/Robb if you squint
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-22
Updated: 2013-01-22
Packaged: 2017-11-26 12:53:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,992
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/650724
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rabbitfurcoat/pseuds/rabbitfurcoat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Catelyn persuades Robb to marry his Frey.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Crown of Knives

**Author's Note:**

> Initially intended as an outlet for me to soothe some ASOS angst and redeem Robb a little (through slightly plotted porn, naturally) while still making him an honor-bound, horny child, but I got invested and it became too long. Maybe control-F ‘cock’ for maximum reading pleasure?
> 
> Characters aged up slightly (you can still make daft, hormone-fueled decisions at eighteen).
> 
> Small warning for sexual assault for a particularly brutal bedding. Those Freys always throw terrible weddings.

 

_I do not wish, love, to see the hatred that stalks me_

_crossing upon the flowery moon of your forehead._

_I do not wish to see peoples’ rancor leaving in your sleep_

_its useless crown of knives._

_Neruda, Sonnet 60_

\---

Robb Stark married his Frey, as promised, on the coldest day the Crossing had seen in a decade, a leaden day with a grey and closed-off sky like a iron helm and ice crusted on the battlements and towers and that precious, damnable bridge.

Robb had once heard that snow during a wedding meant a cold marriage, but certainly many of the Starks of old had married in snow drifts. They wed outside, even if the weirwoods boughs were creaking with snow and their red faces bearded with frost. They wouldn’t have waited until summer, uncertain as that was. Winter was always coming but you could never expect summer, Robb knew. He was the King in the North, the first since Torrhen, but he would wed in a sept, chilly and iceless, as the bride’s father bid. But snow or no snow, his marriage would be cold, Robb knew.                 

The Freys had been laughing about the cold since the morning, twisting his house words into sick japes and ribaldry. Robb heard them now, calling from the long tables in the hall, their laughs longer and louder now that they were deep in their cups.

“Winter has come, aye. I feel it in my balls,” roared a huge man. He had chins hung like so many skirts under his grease-glistening mouth. “Or will be coming!” another yelled, sputtering laughter into his wine. “In our sweet Roslin’s cunt, that is!” the fat man howled, slamming his fist onto the table, and a bench full of Freys exploded into laughter. They said the joke like it was new, like Robb hadn’t heard it from a dozen Freys since breakfast and from Theon fucking Greyjoy a hundred times before that. He looked for his mother down the high table and was relieved to see she’d gone to bed. It wasn’t courteous, but he wouldn’t  have wanted her to hear such things.

From the tables below another Frey started up a chant, his chinless face splitting into a grin at his cleverness: “The King in the North! The—the King in the South!” he yelled, darting his tongue between a fork of his fingers.

 _Cunning_ , Robb thought drily. _I haven’t heard that one before. I wonder if they regaled Torrhen with that one. I should commend that Frey for his… wit. If I only I could tell him apart from the rest._ Robb would never be able to keep track of those Freys, trueborn and bastard all alike with their stringy hair and pinched, but he didn’t intend to try hard. He wanted nothing more than to forget them all and to start with his frigid little bride, sulking and silent at his elbow.

Roslin acted like she didn’t hear the japes, like she hadn’t heard Robb beside her when he offered her portions from their plate or, after a stern glance from his mother, asked her to dance. She’d been frozen all day, never smiling but never crying either, never even looking up from her folded hands, the wine she was swirling in her cup. But when the crowds pounded their cups and called for the bedding, she began to weep quietly, and by the time the men pulled her over the high table, hoisting her straight from her chair to their shoulders, she was sobbing so hard she was hiccupping. Her kinsmen were rough with her, tearing at her gown and groping at her breasts. Robb caught sight of her before the women closed in, crowding their hands around his laces and sniggering suggestions about tongues in his ears, and she looked so frightened he couldn’t help his gut from seizing a little in pity. One of the larger Freys, a brutish boy with limp blond hair and a food-soiled doublet (one of her half-brothers, or maybe a nephew?), flung her over his shoulders like a sack of meal and paraded around the hall, shoving her breasts and bottom in the faces of every gathered man. She fought at first, slapping off hands when they scrabbled beneath her skirts, pinching a boy who tried to squeeze her breast, but then she hung wilted against his back, long hair fallen over her face.

“She’s a limp fish, this one!” someone roared. “I wouldn’t want to bed frigid little girl like that, no matter how tight that cunt is.” “This one is used to fishes. His mother’s all trout and smells like it too!” Another man, leering up at Robb.

Roose Bolton’s fat wife had pushed to the front of the women and pressed her udder-heavy breasts against his chest. Her lank curls were sweat-slicked and her breath sour. “My dear maiden aunt,” she giggled. “You have your work cut out for you. I bet you’re hard enough for the both of you though, wolf boy.” She smirked and pressed her damp hand to his groin. Robb felt his cock contract when she scrabbled at his laces and she hissed to find him flaccid under her hands. “This one’s just as limp. Between these two, I don’t think we’ll get a real bedding tonight!” she hollered back to the men in report. “My lord grandfather could better put a babe in a girl’s belly than you could with this thing,” she breathed into his ear.

Robb’s skin crawled. He wanted to throw her clammy fingers off him and slap back the hands teasing the hair at the back of his neck and lying soft against his stomach, but he was already on dangerous ground with the Freys so he just smiled and waited. He felt like one of the kitchen girls Theon used to tormented at feasts at Winterfell, not the girls he used to scrabble in the stable hay with but the half-starved ones, the orphans from White Harbor his father took on as servants, the ones who paled when Theon fumbled at their chests over the wine pitchers and who brought the trenchers with teary eyes and shy “milords.” He felt an empty, useless rage to have Fat Walda grubbing at his hair, to be bartered for a bridge. A king, he was a king, he thought desperately.

\---

This wedding had been a last ditch effort to calm the rumors that had dogged him since the Crag and to stave off a mutiny from the Freys in his army. His mother had brokered the agreement again, as she had months ago when he thought he could still march south to save his father and nothing had mattered but that. She’d reassured old Walder that any rumors about her son and the Westerling girl were Lannister conspiracies designed to break Robb’s army from within and held no truth. Weren’t the Westerlings sworn to the Lannisters, after all? And wasn’t Robb a king and a Stark, a man who kept his oath? It had been easier to convince Walder Frey to the marriage than it had to convince Robb.

Robb was supposed to be relieved the Freys had agreed to such favorable terms. His mother told him as much, when she returned haggard and sadly triumphant to his camp in the Westerlands. Walder’s only condition had been that Robb marry a Frey girl immediately and that he himself select from among them his daughters. “A small victory,” his mother had said, “but they matter in the larger war. And all kings need an heir, particularly a king who ride into battle.”

But when they brought little Roslin Frey before him, skinny and terrified like a hunted hare, he realized he hadn’t beaten Walder Frey at all. Roslin was reasonably pretty, in a pale, pinched way—or so Robb would have thought if snatches of Jeyne (her wild curls, her pink bow of a mouth, the mole on the inside of her thigh) hadn’t crowded his thoughts whenever he looked at his bride. But she looked little more than a child—and she acted like one too.

It wasn’t just that the Frey girl was slight and ashen or that her hips were narrow and boyish while Jeyne’s had been soft and rich, bowing generously down from her waist and fitting so perfectly against Robb’s side when they slept. It wasn’t just that when he kissed Roslin in the Twins’ sept, with the Stark cloak hung loose and crooked on her shoulders, that her lips were cold and unyielding and so very unlike Jeyne’s, honeyed and warm when she first crushed them to his to chase off his grief. It was that she was so sullen, her arm leaden and strained when she rested it on his, her mouth pinched tight whenever he spoke to her. She turned up her nose when he offered her the finest cuts of lamb from their shared plate and wouldn’t even sip from the goblet of Dornish red he handed her. She was petulant, a disappointed girl, he thought, and he hated her all the more because she could wear her displeasure so openly while he had to grin and jape and feign joy for all the Freys, like he was old Walder’s fool and not a king at all.

He half-remembered that Jeyne was almost like this once, shy and soundless when she first knelt beside his bed, speaking only to ask him how his fever burned and if she should fetch new bandages for the wound that still wept and puckered at his shoulder. He had all but forgotten that Jeyne, the timid, fluttering girl who thought him her enemy even as she groveled before him as her king. Those memories had been buried by later, sweeter ones: the way her breath hitched when he first pushed inside her and the way her lips tripped over his name, how her nipples stiffened and her cunt leaked under his hands  She wasn’t shy then, not after she’d cried out and shuddered around hi , not after he’d taken her twice more and spent each time with her name in the back of his throat. She’d been different after that—prettier, kinder, suddenly mischievous, funny, _familiar_. She was still timid and ladylike in public, all civility and sweet blushes around his men and his mother, but alone (or secretly, with her hand hooked into his under the table) she was bold and funny and the prettiest girl he’d ever seen. Alone she chattered with her head buried in his chest and her curls at his lips, telling him about her sister and brothers, the games they played in the surf, the tricks they played on the servants, worth the laughs even if their mother had an eerie knack for ferreting out schemes. He’d wound a corkscrew curl around his fingers and thought he’d never find a girl as bright and dear and who fit as tight around his cock and moaned so wonderfully against his chest. He’d wanted to marry her for that as much as for her honor.

Theon would have said Robb was tangling up his heart and cock, projecting perfection on a girl just because he’d wet his cock inside her. But Robb no longer believed anything Theon said, even if he couldn’t stop his lessons from echoing hollowly in his head. He doubted chilly little Roslin Frey would crack and warm under his hands and he didn’t think if he fucked her a hundred times he’d think of her with any more affection that he did now, as she sniffled and tore bread beside him. Jeyne would have laughed, high and hiccupping, to see the Freys slobbering at their soup like dogs. She would have rolled her eyes when they set the undercooked lamb before them and chased away its bloody taste from his mouth with her tongue. She would have smirked and palmed him through his breeches when no one was looking and when he bedded her later she would have keened, desperate and perfect and so loud everyone could hear.

\---

Of course, Robb would never know how Jeyne would act, at this awful wedding with the Freys. Jeyne was shut up in the Crag under the ruined roofs and her mother’s prickling stare, and likely to remain there forever, now that she’d been ruined by the King in the North. Everyone in the Westerlands knew Robb Stark had bedded the oldest Westerling girl, that he had presented her to his mother at Riverrun and when they moved on kept her in his camp for weeks, unwed and warming his bed. But they didn’t know how fiercely he’d fought to marry her, how much he wished he done it that first morning, rashly, at the sept in the Crag, when her neck was still welted with his lips and her legs still sticky with a maiden’s blood. But stupidly he’d waited for her father’s consent and his mother’s approval. He’d been pliant, weak to Catelyn’s anger, his men’s grumbling, the weight of his crown, and he’d given her up, surrendered her for some higher good he couldn’t name, much less believe in. He’d wrecked her honor to save own his, and his didn’t seem much worth salvaging after that.

He could have withstood the protests of his men,  the desertion of the Freys, even the devaluing of his word,  but he couldn’t hold out against his mother,  against the reprimand creased in her brow. He saw in her eyes the same wounded pride and disappointment that flared when she looked at Jon, at his lord father scuffling with his bastard son in the yard. He was another Stark who had faltered in a woman’s bed, shamed his house and his (future) wife to take pleasure from a willing and pretty girl. If Jeyne was his Ashara Dayne (and he’d heard the name whispered, if he never told Jon—it was bandied in the tavern at Winter Town, when the men were deep in their cups and Theon was goading them, sniffing for gossip), then his mother thought herself that nameless Frey and she fought him like would have fought Ned.

He saw his mother’s pain and he pushed against it, turning its sharp edge back on her. She sat beside him in his rooms at Riverrun, on the bed where Jeyne had sprawled an hour before, and he was cruel like he didn’t know he could be. “Would you have me father a bastard? Another Snow to bring to Roslin, like Father brought Jon to you?” His heart clenched to hear himself speak so but he pressed on recklessly. “I’d bring that child into my home. I’d love like he was trueborn. More because he was born out of love and not a contract to secure a bridge, a useless crossing south to save a man all but dead already.” He wanted Catelyn to slap him, to right him with the sting of her hand against his cheek like when he was young and unruly and just as foolish as today. But she just cradled his chin in her hands and thumbed over his cheeks like she had when he was younger still, when his was face bare and grimed and tear-streaked. He had forgotten that gesture, it was so lost in the intervening years, in the bravado of growing up.

“My son, my Robb. Does it matter that I didn’t love your father, that I hardly knew him, when he gave me you? My heart burst when they placed you in my arms and I loved you so much and so hard I began to love that stranger who had fathered you. You are like him when you sulk and when you spar and when you laugh. It takes sharp eyes to see it, you’re so like me, but I learned to love him because I saw you in him and him in you. And in your sisters and brothers…” Her voice faded to a sad, chocked trickle. Sometimes he could forget his mother was recently widowed, that she’d lost two children and fretted to death about two more, she was so steel-backed for him.  She smiled at him now, indulgently. “You will love your wife when she puts your son in your arms and when you see her looks in your daughters. I promise that to you. You’re all I have left, Robb. I want your happiness more than anything.”

“But I’m happy now, with Jeyne. Would you take that from me, when we have lost so much? She comforted me, mother—“

“You were always stubborn. You were always loyal to a fault, so trusting and kind even when desperately wished you weren’t. To Jon, to _Theon_.” Her next words were slow, tortured with the effort it took her to say them. “Marry the Frey girl, stay true to your word, and maybe you won’t lose your Jeyne forever. Marry her to a bannerman, someone you can trust. Someone who won’t grow jealous. Be discrete, be careful and you can keep her near. Not close enough to dishonor your wife, but _near_. You would certainly not be the first lord to do so.”

Robb gaped to hear his mother, a woman so wounded by the long-ago stumbles of her husband, suggest such a thing. “Mother, I—”

“Shh, Robb. Nothing is more important now than your word, than the loyalty of your men. It’s what we hang this war on. It’s how we’ll win it and bring back your sisters.” She stood and pressed a kiss to his forehead. “The sins of wartime can be forgotten. A king’s indiscretions can be overlooked, if he is otherwise true. A wife… she can forgive.” She rose and held his chin in her hand. She looked weary, Robb thought, all the worries and the griefs of the last months worn into her face, bruised up under her eyes. In that moment he would have done anything to make the creases in her brow less worried in and her eyes less rung with sadness.

“Mother, I will marry the Frey girl.” The words pickled in his mouth. His sweet, constant Jeyne. She was everywhere in this tent—the heady smell of her hair worn into his pillow, her silver comb tucked among his soiled clothes. He knew what he was condemning her to.  “I will do right.”

Catelyn smiled hopelessly at him, something between pride and pity in her face. “I will call for Jeyne. You will want her tonight, I think.” She slipped out with a small snap of wind, and Robb was left to try to untangle alone whose version of right he was following.

\---

This was that right, he thought. A dozen Frey girls groping at his breeches and another one to warm his bed tonight. He heard a small, strangled cry from the crowd in the hall and saw the ox-boy had finally landed Roslin on the floor. Her grey gown, not so very fine to start, dusty grey with tufts of squirrel hair at the neck, had been torn from the shoulders. A weasel-faced man scrabbled his hand under her shift, twisting his fingers under her smallclothes. Roslin cried out and shoved his hand away but he was already dragging her smallclothes down past her knees, slipping his fingers into his mouth. “Stark!” he called. “I hope you don’t mind that I sampled your queen. A king should never eat from an untouched dish,” he said, leering at Roslin. Another weasel-face hoisted her up and her smallclothes fell past her feet and were snagged from the floor by the first man. He crumpled them to his nose and moaned, load enough for Robb to hear from the high table. Roslin was hiccupping in fear, arms closed tightly over her chest, and her eyes searched for Robb at the high table, wide and frantic. He tried to smile back but she burst into tears, staring at him

“To bed!” someone bellowed and the others took up the chant. “To bed, to bed, to bed!” Suddenly the women were dragging him from the hall toward the bridal chambers. But now Dacey Mormont was among them, tall and stalwart, shoving aside this Walda and that one so she could latch her hands on his tunic and pull him ahead. “Let me at him! Let me see my king!” Her call was loud and lewd but when she pressed her forehead to his she was reassuring, softer than he’d ever heard her.

“She’s just scared, Robb,” she said. “Look at her kinsmen. Look at what she’s grown up around. Don’t hold it against her, not yet.” Roslin. It took him a moment to realize she was talking about Roslin. Dacey Mormont, from a family where the men were the shames and the women lay with bears and swung swords better than their absent lords—Robb never expected _Dacey_ to pity the Frey girl, in all her frailty and snotty tears. But Dacey’s look was so searing he instantly understood: Roslin had become Dacey’s queen the instant Robb hung the direwolf cloak on her shoulders and as she was devoted to him, she would be devoted to his wife, no matter what the circumstances of their marriage.

They were at the door to the bedroom now. Greatjon Umber was beside them with Roslin bundled in his huge arms, his soiled cloak thrown over her. Robb’s little wife was shivering against his vassal’s chest but she looked relieved to have been rescued from the grubbing hands of her kinsfolk. “No way to treat the Queen in the North,” the Greatjon was muttering. “A pack of wildlings, this lot.” Robb had heard whispers that the Umbers kept to the old custom of the first night, lords bedding brides before their husbands could. If the Greatjon was offended by a Frey bedding…

“In quick now,” Dacey said and shoved Robb toward the door. “They’ll catch up.” The Greatjon deposited Roslin on the floor and Dacey slammed the door behind them just as the Freys rounded the corner. “She’s begging for it like a wolf in heat! Give it to her on all fours, my king!” Robb heard her shout before the door crashed and he drew the bolts.

Roslin choked back a sob. The small resolve he’d seen in her face when she was bundled in Greatjon’s arms had failed and, draped in his huge cloak, she looked frail. She drew a small hand under her running nose and wiped her eyes on a clean corner of Umber’s stained cloak.

Robb heard scuffling and howls outside the door: “Don’t be misled, those Frey girls like it rough” “He’d know, he’s had two of her sisters and a niece!” “Teach her to take it rough!” He slammed his foot into the door, all the humiliation of the wedding and the bedding detonating in his kick.

“Don’t listen to them. It’s always like this at beddings. The men, they—“ He tried to be reassuring and gentle but his words rang empty and awkward and she only seemed to cry harder. He knew how to comfort Jeyne when she cried, to chase the tears off her cheeks with his thumbs, to tuck her head under his chin under her shoulders stilled and her salt-rung lips searched for his. He had half a mind to draw Roslin to him now, to hold her not like he held Jeyne, with her breasts tight against his chest, but rather like he used to hold Sansa, when Arya’s tricks turned cruel and her eyes puddled with tears, when he could stroke her hair and shush her with soft noises and she’d calm against him. That had been years ago, before Sansa had grown proud and spiteful, before he learned a man’s hardness. And he doubted Roslin would calm in his arms. She’d probably fight like a cat to be held. To do so would have been to betray Jeyne anyway and he’d made her one promise he intended to keep.

“I always thought I wanted someone to pay attention to me,” Roslin said, voice rough with crying. “No one ever paid attention to me. Not when I was one of dozens and a girl at that. Now I wish they never had. I wish they would all just leave me alone.” She hugged the Greatjon’s cloak tighter around her chest and he heard the plea in her voice, faint but unmistakable. _Leave me alone_.

“I won’t touch you, I—well, you don’t have to worry about that.” He’d sworn as much to Jeyne, when they lay together that last night, when he’d still been too selfish and love struck to spend on her belly and had thrust in her deeply and recklessly, like he’d wanted to make her ruin even more complete with his whelp in her belly. “I won’t lie with the Frey girl,” he’d told her, half-babbling. “I couldn’t lie with the Frey girl, not while you still live. Probably after too. I’ll never—“

Jeyne had laughed, more disbelieving than bitter. “You’re young. You’re insatiable”—her hand at his cock, hard instantly—“you know your duty. No, my lord. My sweet Robb.” She rolled over to straddle him, to rock her hips and slide herself, seeping and hot, over him. “You’ll bed the Frey girl and you’ll never even think of me when you’re buried between her legs.”

“Impossible,” he groaned and leaned up to crush his mouth against hers, desperate to drive those words from her mouth. He’d flipped her beneath him them and pushed into her so wildly her breath caught like the first time and he spent in a half dozen crooked strokes. The memory made his mouth—and his groin—twitch even now, as he stood before his weeping child bride (not a child, he had to remind himself, not much younger than him in truth, the same age as Jeyne, even) and swore not to touch her.

But if he thought he’d comfort Roslin with such a promise, he was wrong. Her sobs had hollowed into wet sniveling, but a funny look of desolation came over her pinched, tear blotched face. “They’ll know.” She spoke quickly, a blush seeping into her cheeks. “There should be blood. My septa tells me there should be blood, that they’ll look for it on the sheets the next morning, to tell if a marriage is real.”

There had been blood when Robb had taken Jeyne ( _ruined_ her, he was supposed to think, but their couplings had been so sweet he could never think of them so crudely): it had clung to his cock and dribbled down her legs with his seed and he had felt perversely proud to look at it. Theon used to say it was a peculiar pleasure to take a maidenhead, that it had its dangers (“Maidens become attached to the sword that bloodied them. It’s inconvenient”) and its untidiness, but that it was something special to put your cock where you knew no man had been before. He hadn’t been a virgin when Jeyne let him into her bed, not quite—if you could count a fumbled visit to a whorehouse on when he was fifteen and egged on by Theon and a clumsy romp with a kitchen girl when he was younger still and had spilt across her thigh he was so eager and awestruck. (But he certainly wouldn’t count the times he’d woken hard and desperate and wound around Theon in cold, the times they’d tugged down each others’ smallclothes and crowded out the shame with talk of girls. Robb wouldn’t even think of that.)

But he hadn’t been a green boy either way and it made him feel important, more important than even his crown or the loyalty of his men ever made him feel, to be the one who taught Jeyne what little he knew.

“That’s easy.” There was a knife lying on the table beside the fire, set on plate with a soggy loaf of bread and a greening hunk of cheese. Sustenance for the lovers, he thought wryly. He brought it to the bed and threw back the furs. Just a knick and he could squeeze out enough blood for a maidenhead, he thought.

Roslin was beside him suddenly, stretching out her hand to him. “Let me,” she said. “It should be my blood, shouldn’t it?”“I hardly think they could tell—“ Robb protested but she slid her forefinger down the blade and blood was already slipping down her hand in rivulets.

“Oh.” Her voice was hushed, heavy with awe, and she smeared her hand across the sheet, dragging a comet tail of blood across the white.

“Roslin!” Robb grabbed her wrist, dumbstruck, and pulled her away from the bed. “Why did you do that? You didn’t have to—“ Her hand looked vulnerable and soft in his, her bloody fingers curled back over the soft meat of her palm and the pulse at her wrist jumping under his fingers. She wasn’t crying and she wasn’t fighting him off. She was simply staring at the hand caught between them, watching the blood bubble up from the cut and leak down her fingers.

“You’ll bleed everywhere, Roslin.” Robb was surprised by the gruffness in his voice.

“It’s nothing, it’s a prick,” she said, her voice more level than his. She drew the finger into her mouth and something warm unlooped in his gut. She sucked the cut dry (it wasn’t deep but it was certainly more than a prick, with the skin puckered and purple around it) and moved onto to her other fingers, her palm, the back of her hand, so close to _his_ fingers. He should have brought her to the wash basin in the corner or offered her his shirt or at least let go of her hand, but he couldn’t tear his eyes away from her tongue and her mouth, sucking on her fingers, laving across her palm.

“Sorry, it’s just something one of my sisters told me once. Women should be less afraid of blood than men, even. We’re used to it. She told me that to make me brave when I … first bled.” She flushed. “I’m sorry. I’m being vulgar. My septa would be shocked.” She pulled away from his grip, tucking her hand like a wilted flower against her chest. There was a funny bravery about this one, even if it was a little reckless, Robb thought. 

Robb looked down at his own hand, suddenly empty, blood worked into all its lines and smeared down his fingers. He stretched them out to Roslin, only half in jest. He had a strange vision of her sliding her velvet tongue over his palm and sucking his fingers into her mouth. It flickered out quickly when she shook her head and laughed. “There’s a wash basin in the corner,” she said and Robb tried to ignore the curdle of disappointment in his stomach, the twinge in his groin. She was pretty, Robb admitted to himself—not nearly as pinched and weasely as most of the Freys. He’d been lucky in that, at least. And he already liked the pale hatching of freckles across her nose and the look in her big eyes, dark and puddled like a fawn’s. When she laughed, her nose crinkled like a hare’s and her lips split to show the tiny gap between her teeth and he felt like he’d discovered a secret.

He swallowed hard and rubbed his hand on his breeches “I’ve seen much blood these past months.” _I’ve spilled much blood_. “But when it was my own, when I took an arrow… Well, I was as sick as untested boy then. Maybe you would have been made of sterner stuff.”

She shook her head, ashamed. “Of course not. I’m not so brave as that. It’s just something a woman says to a girl to make her less afraid of growing up.”

“Were you afraid of growing up?” He thought of Sansa, how eager she’d been to wear her hair up in braids, to marry her whelp prince, the future king with the bleating voice and the empty boasts. Sansa would have been wise to have a little of Roslin’s fear.

“All girls are frightened of growing up. It means you can be wed and”—she swallowed, her eyes straying over to the bed, the red blot her hand had left there. “You can leave home then. You can be sent wherever, married to whomever and with as little say as a traded horse.”

Boys, too, Robb thought. Even kings.

“I was betrothed once before, when I was very small,” Roslin said. “He was old, widowed. One of my father’s vassals. I used to pray to the Maiden every night that I wouldn’t grow up, that she’d keep me a girl forever so we’d never wed. He died before I bled and I thought I’d killed him with those prayers. I thought that for a long time.” She shrugged, fretting with the peeled back skin on her finger. “Maybe it would have been better if I was his wife. I wasn’t meant to be a queen.”

Another girl had told Robb that once, protested that a daughter from a ruined keep in the Riverlands was never supposed to be a queen. He’d shushed her with his lips and told her a hundred times with his tongue at her ear how she was a queen if he said so, she was a queen because she was loved by a king. Robb couldn’t offer any comfort to Roslin. If she was meant to be a queen she certainly wasn’t meant to be his. Still he grabbed her slivered hand and cradled it to his chest. “Shh, don’t touch it. You’ll make it worse.”

Her breath was quivering and she dipped her head until it almost grazed his chest. “I am very foolish when I want to prove I’m brave.”

“We should tie this off or it’ll start bleeding again,” Robb said. “Here.” He found the knife on the bed, rusted a little with blood, and cut a swatch from his tunic. He tied it tight around her finger and he thought of Jeyne, how she’d knotted the bandages on his shoulder, how gentle her fingers were before she even knew him, how threaded with love. She was the wound he’d taken away from the Crag. The entire ride to the Twins he’d fingered over the hole of her absence, probing it like a gash he wouldn’t let heal, wanting it to rankle and sting as much in ten years as it did that first day. But still he’d steeled a little to the pain. It ached with the damp like an wound already long forgotten, and sometimes he didn’t feel it at all.

 “There. Good as new.” He pressed a kiss to Roslin’s hairline, as if to apologize, if he didn’t fully know what for. For all his intended brotherly brusqueness he couldn’t help but shiver at the smell of her hair—a little like lilac and a little like lamb but mostly like winter, crisp and bright and tart—and he didn’t pull away.

“You should be going to bed,” she said, soft and ragged. “You’re to leave in the morrow for Moat Cailin and I’m to go with your mother to Seagard. There’s little time for weddings in war.” Quieter, “I might be a widow before I’m even properly a wife.”

Robb leaned back to study her. Her doe-hide hair hung over her face and she was still clutching Greatjon’s leagues of clock around her scrawny shoulders. He wondered where the direwolf cloak was. Probably left in the hall, slipped off the back of her chair and trampled and muddied by revelers. He thought how pretty Jeyne’s curls would have looked over the wolf fur collar, messy and bright and perfectly matched, and his heart clenched.

 “I’m morbid, I’m sorry. You’ll win, of course. They say the Young Wolf is invincible.” Roslin held her chin high. “I’ll be a good wife for you, Robb, in all the ways I can. My brother Olyvar says I’m like a cat—soft to touch and sometimes sweet but hard to love and content without it. I don’t like pity and I don’t think I’m weak but I’d let you do what you needed to, love who you please.” Her voice was rushed now, words knocking against one another, but her gaze was steady, trained on his. “I have been almost happy here with little, with a room to share and a hundred kin to crowd out the quiet, and I will be again. You’re not to worry about me. I’m of little importance. I’m invisible.”

She knew, of course, Robb realized. She would have heard the rumors when they trickled north from the Westerlands. She would have known before her father choose her that the King in the North loved another, that more than any other arranged marriage this would be conducted under duress. Roslin wasn’t afraid of being a queen or being bedded and she didn’t cry because of either, Robb realized. She was afraid of being married to a man who would never care for her. She thought he resented her, and wasn’t she right? Hadn’t he hated how chilled and limp her kiss was when they stood together in the sept and how the direwolf cloak he hung on her shoulders snagged in her hair and dragged on the ground? Hadn’t he loathed her at dinner, when her mouth was so sullen and her hands so quivering, fiddling with her food? Hadn’t he been comparing her to Jeyne since he first saw her, finding all the ways she was inferior (downturned mouth, gapped teeth, child’s hips) and seizing onto them like proofs of his misfortune?

Roslin had turned her back to him and was shrugging off the giant cloak, pulling the ruined tatters of her wedding gown and shift over her head. Robb told himself he should look away. He didn’t have the right (hadn’t he been insisting to himself from the start that their marriage was a sham? hadn’t Roslin agreed and gone so far as to cut herself to avoid his touch?) and, he reminded himself, standing straighter, he didn’t have the _want_. He’d sworn as much to Jeyne and he’d sworn it to himself every night in the camp along the road to the Twins, when he spent into his hands and his furs at the memory of her wet pink mouth and the thicket of hair between her legs and told himself it would be enough. He had been almost relieved to see Roslin so scrawny and pale in her grey gown, her brown hair lank and dull against the squirrel hair collar, and to count all the ways she was unlike Jeyne.

But out of the gown, with the fire’s glow warming her skin, she was surprisingly pretty. Too thin, perhaps, (and given the food at the Twins and the way a hundred hands grubbed for it, Robb wasn’t surprised) but certainly not childish. Her hair was richer in the light, falling in loose waves down her back. She pulled her nightshift on too quickly and turned back to him, arms crossed protectively over her chest.

“Sorry, it’s thin, almost sheer in places. One of my brother’s wives gave it too me and told me it wouldn’t matter I’d be in it so little.” She pinked. “I feel foolish. And cold.” She moved to the far side of the bed and knelt there uneasily, as far away from the blood smear as she could manage, knees hooked under her shift and furs gathered around her shoulders. Robb sank onto the bed, an image of Jeyne, wild-haired and panting, sprawled across the furs on the bed they shared in Riverrun, surging back painfully

“I’m very sorry, Roslin. About this mess. My head isn’t right.” It hadn’t been right since he’d learned just how deep Theon’s betrayal was. His brothers, his helpless little brothers, crippled Bran and tiny Rickon, too young to understand— He’d pulled Jeyne into his muddle and his grief and his love had ruined her, nearly ruined him. And now he was apologizing to his little Frey bride for everything, for their forced marriage, for his callousness, for the fact that, despite all his promises, despite Jeyne, he still wanted to reach out and touch her hair, pull her close to him. “I’ll bring you to Winterfell when this is all over… Once we’ve rebuilt it.” It was ruined. He had to remember that. It had be torched by Theon as the Northmen retook it. He’d slaughtered half the household and set his horse alight, smiling like he’d gone mad, they said.  No, he wouldn’t think of that. He wouldn’t think of Jeyne and he wouldn’t think of Theon and he wouldn’t think of his brothers— He wouldn’t think of anything that had come before.

He’d think of Roslin. She was smiling prettily at him, but it stung just the same. A ruined keep and a crown were sad consolations to offer an unwanted bride, Robb thought.

This wasn’t honorable. He thought it would be, selflessly forswearing Roslin out of love for Jeyne, rejecting what was lawfully his, ignoring the traitorous rise of his blood.

He could have taken Roslin easily. She would have been too dutiful to protest, taught too well by her septa and her sisters about a man’s rights, his needs. He could have been rushed and rough, taking her on all fours like Theon used to take the uglier kitchen girls, the ones with pocked faces and pug noses, the ones Theon claimed could take a cock as well as any woman if you just turned them around. He could have pretended she were Jeyne and tangled up her hair in his hands like curls and come with his eyes shut and another’s name in his throat. Roslin would have submitted. Her eyes might have teemed with tears like they did when her brothers and uncles clutched at her breasts, but she would have submitted. The unruly rise of heat in his gut at the thought told him how much he would have enjoyed the act, even if his mind cried out at the cruelty, the dishonor of taking his lady wife like a kitchen wench or a lookalike whore.

But this wasn’t honorable either: shunning her, wrecking their marriage before it had even begun. He thought about Theon’s kitchen girls, screaming when they were scuffling and furrowing together in the stable hay, of the red-headed whore in the brothel in winter town, keening theatrically when he clumsily ran his fingers over the wet creases between her thighs. He thought about Jeyne, pulsing under his mouth, boneless and dizzy and drawing him up to taste herself tart on his tongue. And he thought of Roslin, chilly little Roslin Frey, quivering and shattering under his fingers, and he wondered how she would taste—as sweet and sharp as her hair? Robb pressed the heel of his hand against his cock, achingly hard, and bit back a groan. In that woozy heat it was all so simple, so inevitable. She was his _wife_.

He stretched back on the bed and regarded her upside down. He felt impossibly young, too young to have a wife, hardly old enough to have a woman. She was worrying at the bandage on her finger, tearing at it with her teeth, and she started to find him watching. He thought of Dacey’s words before the bedroom door and Roslin’s hiccupping cries when she was handed from man to man. And Jeyne, bold, bright Jeyne, tucking his hand against her breast and kissing him so fiercely he couldn’t think of anything beyond her tongue and her curves and her hand at his cock, not even of his dead brothers, his traitor best friend. She had taken him into her bed eagerly and kissed him with a hunger he hadn’t thought highborn girls possessed. (Theon had said lords’ daughters were frigid, cold to kiss and even colder between the legs, with cunts like fish bellies, damp and slimy, good only for breeding. That was why the Greyjoys  took saltwives, captured tavern wrenches and fisherman’s wives, girls who knew how to squeal and lust and take a cock in their mouths. He saw Jeyne knelt before him, hair knotted and wild— _had he done that?—_ mouth hot and slick around him, and felt the familiar fever claw up under his skin. Theon couldn’t have bedded many highborn girls, Robb thought. But he had to stop thinking of Theon. Sometimes it was easy to forget...)

But Roslin had cried so desperately when they dragged her to his chambers and she was curled so tightly on their bed, arms twined around her shoulders and legs covered to the ankles. She’d even sliced her finger open on a knife to avoid the deed. _But I suggested it_ —a small, tinny voice Robb muffled quickly. He couldn’t bear that guilt too.

Experimentally he brushed his thumb over the knob of her ankle and skimmed it slowly up her leg, tugging up the thin fabric of her nightshift. Her knees were like bird skulls under his hands, so fragile he felt they would shatter. Her face was unreadable, eyes screwed tight, but her breath was ragged, and Robb knew he couldn’t go through with it.

He withdrew his hand and sat up. “I’ll make up a pallet on the floor.”

“Don’t—I mean, you don’t have to. Your road is long tomorrow. And it wouldn’t do for a king to spend his wedding night on the floor. I don’t mind.”

Robb glanced at the bed. It was broad, the finest bed in the Twins dragged to this room for a king and his pleasure. A king and his pleasure. He almost laughed. “Only if you’re sure,” Robb said. “I won’t bother you, you know.”

Her smile was half-hearted but she promised him she was sure. She slid a little closer toward the center of the bed, as if to show him, but kept the furs drawn to her chin. The bed would be more comfortable than a skin thrown in front of the hearth and certainly the most comfortable place Robb had slept in since he left Riverrun and Jeyne. But he doubted his sleep would be restful , not with Roslin beside him, frozen and scared and pretty, _yes, very pretty_. He would imagine there was a blade balanced between them, like when knights and their unwed ladies slept abed in the stories Old Nan told, and they would sleep as chaste as brother and sister. Robb wouldn’t have imagined this afternoon in the sept, when Roslin’s kiss was so chilled and heartless, that he would find the task so difficult.

\---

He dreamt of Jeyne, the sleep-sodden weight of her on his chest, the swell of her hips cocked over his, the itch of her hair at his neck. Drowsy and half-hard, he tugged her closer so her breasts slid across his side and her breath fell hot on his cheek, and she murmured, sleep-drunk and soft: “Robb.”

It wasn’t the voice he was expecting. It was pitched too low, fond but not yet worn-in, still unsteady over his name, and for a moment he didn’t know where he was.

_Roslin. Of course._

She was curled against him, hand fisted loosely on his chest and hair adrift on his pillow. The fire had burned down to blue embers and she was shivering, nuzzled into the crook of his arm. They’d started on opposite sides of the bed, Roslin so close to the edge he thought she’d tumble out, but had ended twined together in the center, with the sky gaping through the shutter slats still dark. She was pretty like this, Robb thought, with her hair tousled and her face soft with sleep and her nipples pinched and pink beneath her shift. And her leg hooked over his was dangerous, her knee settled inches from his groin (and gods, he was hard) but he couldn’t bring himself to shift her. But fuck, she was stirring, pressing closer, and that wasn’t helping, it certainly wasn’t helping, and all he could think of was snaking his hands under her rucked up hem and finding her sweet and seeping and—

Roslin jerked awake, startled by the unconscious fumble of his hands to his smallclothes. “Robb?” For a moment she was bleary-eyed and confused, languid against him and her voice run through treacle. But she was waking quickly, panic and red seeping into her face, and sitting up.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean— I was asleep.” She had untangled herself from his arms. “Gods, I’m as bad as my sister Ami, throwing myself at you. But I didn’t mean to. I swear I was asleep.” She crushed her fist against her mouth. “I’ve been wanton in all the ways my septa warned me about and it’s a hundred time worse…”

“Shh, shh,” Robb grabbed her wrists, brought her crumpled hands to his mouth. “What’s wrong?” He knew she’d be upset to wake with his arm wound over her shoulder and her breasts tucked against his chest, but she didn’t seem angry at _him_.

“You are very kind, my lo— _king_. I never meant to … throw myself at you, especially after you made it so clear…”

“What? What have I made clear?” Robb demanded, frustration creeping into his voice.

She quailed and fought her hands out of his grip. She spoke quickly, her words small and barbed. “Clear that you were forced into this marriage. That you have no wish to make me your true wife, _to lie with me_.”  

Robb didn’t know whether to weep or to laugh. It was so foolish. How could she think he didn’t want her, when he’d been sleeping on knives, his hands itching for her and all his blood thrumming between his legs, when even now all he wanted was to fold her to his chest and crush those silly words in her mouth.

“Everyone will talk. They’ll say I’m a false wife, or that I’m barren. Everyone talks. Everyone _knows_. They’ll say I’m an unwanted maid, foisted on the King in the North for a river crossing. The little Frey girl, one of hundred and all a pack of stoats. Not pretty enough for a king, not highborn enough, too scrawny, too sad.” She looked so forlorn Robb wanted to shake her.

She’d seen through his mummer’s show at dinner, of course, knew the emptiness in his laugh and the dead space between his smiles. She knew he’d loved a girl from the Westerlands, that he’d been nearly dragged to the Twins to fulfill his oath. And she saw him stand in this room, beside their wedding bed, when she’d been flung and groped by half the hall, and promise never to touch her, as solemn as he was when he promised in the sept that she was his. Of course she thought he didn’t want her: she’d heard it from his own mouth. Robb crushed his hands to his eyes. He was a king but sometimes he felt very much a child, no different than the boy who had sparred in Winterfell’s yard with a blunted blade not a year back, the boy who once bedded a red-headed whore with fear and hands all of thumbs to prove he was old, the boy who naively thought the path of honor clean and never crooked. When had it all become so crooked?

Roslin wept silently and Robb did the only thing he could think to do. He held her face, knitting her hair through his fingers, and forced her to look up at him. Her eyes darted away and she clutched at his wrists as if to shake him off but he held firm. “Look at me,” he heard himself saying, faraway and small. She stared back, brown eyes jellied with unspilled tears, bottom lip plush and quivering. He leaned forward to catch it between his own. She mewled softly against his mouth, salt-rung lips parting under his tongue.

 He drew back, thumbing over the streaks of tears on her cheeks, the pale dappling of freckles over her nose, the bruise already welling up on her bottom lip. “I want you very much,” he said, his voice coarser and more desperate than he intended. Gods, did he want this.

Roslin stared back, tongue bumping over a protest. “But—“

“But what? I believe we’re wed. I believe you’re mine.” He pulled her to him, nuzzling her hair, letting her feel him hard against her belly.

She rested her head against his, breath warm on his mouth. “You should be sure. I… I wouldn’t want you not to be sure.” _Don’t do this if you’ll think me a betrayal later,_ she was saying. _Don’t do this if you don’t care._

He grabbed her roughly and they tumbled back onto the bed, Roslin flush against him, her hair tangled up in his hands and her weight warm against his groin. He kissed her and she kissed back, sweet and almost chaste, with a tongue like velvet under his and a mouth like honey and lemon cakes and pine. He rocked his hips against his, desperate for friction, and drowned a moan in her mouth. He wanted to be in her, he wanted to be buried to the hilt inside her and making her breath hitch and her eyes glaze and her chest heave and he wanted to spend inside her and feel her cunt pulse around him--Were she Jeyne he would already would be inside her, with his head at her breasts and her hands tucked between them to stroke herself. The first time even, he’d been so blinded with grief and the feel of her under his hands he hadn’t attended much to her cries and noticed the blood only after, when it clung in clots to him and dribbled down her thighs and she said she’d have to burn to sheets…

But Jeyne was distant and small now, a figure seen down a telescope, and when he tried he couldn’t remember what her laugh sounded like or how he breasts had filled his hands. He could only feel Roslin, her breasts firm and small like apples, her hips rising tentatively against his. She was a maid and his… wife. He’d have to go slowly.

 He hooked his fingers under the hem of her shift, the question heavy between them. She nodded quickly, blushing, and raised her arms to let him pull it over her head. She was thin (he could number her ribs if he had a mind to) but her hips were gently curved, her nipples pink and pebbled, and the hair between her legs honey brown and softly curled. Yes, he wanted her very much.

She trembled a little but she stared back unflinchingly, sweeping her long hair away from her breasts. “You now,” she said with an unsteady smile and he kissed her again, harder this time and needier, hands fumbling for her breasts. Her breath caught when his fingers circled her nipple and she whimpered, high and ragged, when he brought it to this mouth. “You’re mine,” Robb heard himself saying, the words ringing strange in his ears but sliding easily off his tongue.

He trailed kisses down her chest and stomach and into the hair at the juncture of her legs and, a cry catching in her throat, the pink folds below. She was like crumpled silk there and tasted tart and perfect.

Roslin was quieter than Jeyne was, gulping back her cries and turning her head to the pillow, but when she came she came sudden and sharp, voice pitched high and legs quavering around his ears. She was languorous and soft when he pulled her to him, curling blindly in his arms like a kitten.

“Thank you. I didn’t—Well it’s never like that when I do it.” Her voice was slow and viscous, full of wonder. Robb swallowed hard, the thought of her touching herself, alone with her legs splayed and her fingers sliding into herself, twisting in deep, making him lightheaded. His lips were glazed with her and he crushed them to her mouth, sliding his tongue over hers so she could taste herself, sweet and slippery in his mouth.  She moaned and pressed closer and he could feel the heat and slick of her against his smallclothes. She laughed and nipped at his lip, sharp and stinging, and he drew her closer. She was ever surprisingly, his Frey girl.

She jerked away, breathing heavily and wriggling away from his kiss, a sly, wobbly smile spreading across her face. “I think—“  She hooked her fingers at the waist of his smallclothes, hand quavering against his stomach, eyes black and searching. She was a funny mixture of shy and wonderstruck and wicked, this one. She was bluffing, he knew, when she palmed him through his smallclothes and slipped her hand inside to trace wobbly lines down his shaft. She was scared and unsure but desperately pretending not to be, he knew. “I am very reckless when I want to prove I’m brave,” she’d said and when she circled her hand around him, hot and perfect, he thought he liked this type of recklessness.

A cry hitched up in her throat when he pushed into her and her eyes brimmed with tears but she was telling him not to stop, gritting her teeth and trying to smile, and he pretended he didn’t feel her tremble. “Robb, Robb.” She was murmuring his name and canting her hips and he thrust into her blindly, drunk on her heat. He wanted to spill every dirty, beautiful word he knew into her ears but he was afraid his tongue would slide to _Jeyne_ like a habit and wreck the feeble peace between them. He wouldn’t think of Jeyne, not now. He owed that much to Roslin. He opened his eyes and looked down at her, her tangled hair and her bruised mouth and the edge of her teeth at her lips, all the wide-eyed awe and trust in her face, and he kissed her, hard and hungry, so he couldn’t think of anything else.  

She was tight and it had been too long (just two weeks, the ride to the Twins, but he was young and insatiable, Jeyne said). His thrusts were careless and ragged and he spent too soon, eyes crossing and heart heaving. He crumpled against her, boneless and dizzy, and buried his face in her breasts, feeling the leak of blood and seed against his thigh. She cradled his head, kissing his damp curls and saying his name again and again, and it was sounded so perfect in her mouth his heart clenched and he found himself saying hers back like a prayer.

They fell asleep with legs entwined and foreheads brushing, Roslin cupping her chin in her hand like a child. This time Robb didn’t dream.

\---

He took her again in the morning, in the grey half light before dawn, slower this time and more carefully. She rocked her hips upward to him, her rhythm a little clumsy and her eyes wide, but she was catching on fast.

He spent quickly again, so quickly he would have been embarrassed if she’d been more practiced. But she was so tight and the noises she made were so sharp and urgent and _new_. He’d want to remember them, when he was away and his bed was cold and his hand all calluses and need. He needed to remember this, the freckles plotted across her breasts, the flush on her cheeks, the slick of his seed down her legs, the way she kissed him, reverent and hungry and wet.

Afterwards he made her peak with his fingers crooked inside her and his mouth at her ear, whispering to her how beautiful she was, how much he wanted her to come for him. And when she splintered and called out to him he felt something like affection (or maybe pride) crack open in his chest.

When he pulled back the furs there was blood streaked across the sheets, a smaller, brighter smear than the one from her sliced finger. No one would question that he’d done his duty to his bride. It looked like he’d bedded two virgins that night, he thought and nearly laughed.

She was skittish and shy again in the full light, tugging her hair over her breasts and twitching at the dressing around her finger. But when he led her to the wash basin she didn’t protest and stood naked, nipples hard in the chill, and let him wash the blood from her legs and kiss her behind the ear.

Someone had rescued the direwolf cloak from the hall and she was wearing it the last time he saw her, standing in the yard at the Twins, her chestnut hair loose in the wolf fur collar and her lips still fattened and red. The wind was sharp, tearing at the hem of her cloak and frightening the horses when it screamed around the battlements. His men were grumbling and reeking of ale and Robb himself felt leaden and raw-eyed but it had been him to insist on this early departure, when he thought he’d want to flee from his Frey bride before dawn. He wouldn’t contradict his orders because a Glover or two were heaving up their breakfasts in the yard and Roslin smiling so prettily beside his mother.

Catelyn kissed him first, holding his face like she did when he was a boy. She wasn’t pleased to bundled off to Seagard, left behind from a war as much hers as his, but she wouldn’t fight him in public. He was her king, even if she ruffled his hair like a son.

“Take care of Roslin,” he said. “She won’t have anyone else.” He was surprised by the thickness in his voice but Catelyn wasn’t. Her smile was knowing and almost smug when she grasped his hands. “I will.” _Yes, you win, mother. My heart is fickler than I thought, weak to smiles and skin and the itch in my loins. Theon was right too. We’re all just dragged along to love by our cocks._

Roslin stood beside Catelyn, cheeks pinking in the cold and at the lewd jokes his men called from their horses when he stooped to kiss her forehead. She smiled feebly and squeezed his hand. “I guess this is farewell then.” Grey Wind nudged at their joined hand, pushed his snout into her stomach, and her hands shivered a little in his. _Now I have another woman to worry about, another treasure to guard from the Lannisters, more to fear and more to lose._

“It’s all right. He won’t hurt you, not with me here. And I think he likes you.” More likely he just smells me on you, Robb thought. There hadn’t been time to properly bathe before their early departure. He knew he smelled like Roslin under his mail and leather, that he’d smell like her for a week or more, lilac and pine and the sweat of sex, clinging to his skin when he pulled off his cloak and his breeches, staying until he finally had a chance to bathe in some icy stream on the road north. They’d wash her quickly, dump her into a hot bath as soon as he’d ridden out and scour the smell of him out of her hair and from between her legs, but for now, when he tugged her close, he thought he could smell himself under the wool of her dress and it made his blood rise to think of it.

“I’ll come back for you. After I’ve retaken Winterfell. I’ll bring you home.” Robb was surprised by the cinders in his mouth, the twinge under his ribs. This didn’t hurt like his goodbye to Jeyne did, when she kissed him before the gods and his men and his mother, lips salty with tears and sharp with teeth and fury, and her fist crushed against his leather and mail, beating at his chest and holding him tight. That was a ripple of wildfire searing from his gut to his throat and whenever he thought of it his innards still crackled and singed. This was a certain ache though, an itch at the back of his throat, a pang in his groin when he remembered her hot and perfect beneath him. It was no more than needle prick and it would heal soon but for now it was stinging, smarting when she drew back her hand and dipped her chin behind her hair.

She offered him her cheek again but he kissed her full on the mouth and he felt her heart flutter through all the fur and leather between them. His men were whistling but he could hardly hear them over the wind, the thump of his heart synced with hers. “I’ll think of you,” he mumbled into her cheek and she nodded. “Me too.”

He thought of her as he rode from the Twins in weak snow and he thought of her when his eyes ached and the road was interminable and mudded and he thought of her when he fell into his camp bed at night, when his muscles burned from the road and his groin pulsed under his hand. He thought of Jeyne more but he thought of Roslin too, slicing her finger on the knife and keening under his fingers and smiling so sly and unsteady and lovely.

He thought of her a lot. 


End file.
